As far as movie formulas go, these Ocean's movies have it made. The first film, a remake of an amiable Rat Pack flick from the '60s, got most of its mileage from handsome, likable movie stars bantering just as we imagine handsome, likable movie stars bantering in their real lives. The second film refined the formula, practically dispensing with the heist plot and edging the series into the realm of pseudo-documentary (Julia Roberts' character gets mistaken for Julia Roberts by Bruce Willis, playing himself.) And probably the biggest laugh of this likable third entry comes when Brad Pitt's character (I forget his name) chides George Clooney's Danny Ocean (I only remember his because it's in the title) for packing on pounds in between heists ? a dig at his Oscar-winning role in Syriana ? only for Clooney to retort that Pitt himself should start a family and have a couple of kids ? in reference to his misadventures with Angelina Jolie.
We're drawn to these films because they make us feel we've been offered a privileged glimpse into the actors' lives. Said actors are the anti-Cruises; their power comes not from their kooky aloofness, but from their seeming availability. That these privileged glimpses only serve (go figure) to make these folks seem even cooler and more appealing is all the better. It ensures that we'll line up the next time another Ocean's rolls out. Meta never seemed so sexy.
You might be wondering what this third entry is actually about. Here, Danny Ocean and his crew start feeling vengeful (but in a very relaxed, affable way) when their colleague and patron Reuben (Elliott Gould) gets stiffed by shark-like casino developer Willie Bank (Al Pacino) in the creation of a new Vegas playhouse. They then conspire to arrange for Bank to lose lots of money, while also thwarting his ambitions to get a coveted award. As usual, making all this happen requires lots of elaborately conceived, not to mention far-fetched, trickery.
But plausibility is not the issue here; we just want to spend some time with the movie stars. And while the film certainly delivers the goods on that score, director Steven Soderbergh and company are pulling back a bit. After all, Ocean's 12 was such a cavalcade of starfuckery that the plot practically vanished. Here, the plot makes a comeback, but its complexity may be at odds with our simple star-watching needs. Although the balance ultimately works here, it makes you wonder just how enduring the appeal of the series will be. Enjoy it while it lasts. — Bilge Ebiri
Having heartily skewered Romero-inspired zombie flicks in the 2004 cult hit Shaun of the Dead, director Edgar Wright and writer-actor Simon Pegg now turn their attention to American cinema's true plague: the Bruckheimer-derived buddy-cop picture. Their cheekiest idea this time is to dispense with the genre's usual wild-eyed renegades: Hot Fuzz's ostensible hero is one Nicholas Angel (Pegg), a doggedly by-the-book bobbie whose sterling arrest record and unimpeachable sense of professional ethics threaten to make the rest of London's police force look incompetent at best, wholly corrupt at worst. He's therefore transferred against his will to a quaint, cozy English village, where his new partner turns out to be the town drunk (Nick Frost, once again the ideal shambolic sidekick) and a typical day's work involves issuing a summons for jaywalking. Until, that is, various townsfolk begin meeting with mysterious "accidents," invariably in the vicinity of the village's unctuous excuse for a business mogul (Timothy Dalton).
Movies like Bad Boys II and Point Break are already more than halfway to self-parody, so it's remarkable how much comic mileage Hot Fuzz gets from shots of dorky English dudes strutting in slow-mo as a hot-orange fireball explodes directly behind them. It helps a great deal that Pegg, a ferrety screen presence whose entire head sometimes seems to be receding, possesses both pitch-perfect timing and surprising range; he's as magnificently uptight here as he was gloriously bewildered in Shaun of the Dead. But while nobody will fail to bust a gut laughing, it's hard to understand why a goofy lark like this should clock in at more than two hours. By the final half hour, it's hard to tell whether Hot Fuzz qualifies as spoof or straight-faced homage; Wright and company are having so much fun blowing shit up that their movie eventually threatens to become as tiresome as its targets. Save some of this stuff for the deleted-scenes section of the DVD, fellas. — Mike D'Angelo
Genre cannot contain Ryan Gosling. Last year's majestic inner-city-teacher drama Half Nelson didn't sound like much on paper, The Notebook must the sappiest romantic drama in recent memory, and Murder By Numbers — well, the title spoke volumes. And yet, despite an agent who appears to love cookie-cutter roles — I'll admit that his breakthrough as a neo-Nazi/Orthodox Jew in The Believer ruins this convenient thesis — Gosling has emerged as a possible Actor of His Generation. Brooding, sexy and self-aware, he generally refuses to do the homework as assigned; his appeal stems from his idiosyncratic approach to even the most standard roles.
Fracture, a decent legal thriller that borrows most of its cues from more successful predecessors, is no exception to the Gosling rule. He plays Los Angeles Assistant D.A. Willy Beachum, who decides to take on an open-and-shut attempted-murder case as his farewell to the public sector. (He's ready to cash in with a hot job lined up at a corporate firm.) The defendant, played by Anthony Hopkins as a cosmopolitan, minor-key Hannibal Lecter, shot his cheating wife and apparently signed a full confession, but because the arresting cop (and confessor) was also the guy fucking his wife — whoops! — the confession is thrown out. Thus begins a diverting battle of wits between the prosecutor with one foot out the door and his smarmy equal on the other side of the courtroom, who obsesses over finding the cracks in Beachum's cocky façade. As an audience, we take our cues from Gosling, who never treats his diagrammed moral dilemmas or legal quandaries as more than a board game. He keeps it fun.
Director Gregory Hoblit (Primal Fear) emphasizes cleverness over plausibility, so Fracture entertains but never quite thrills. Hopkins clicks on the cruise control as the detached, coldly British sociopath, and Gosling allows him to chew the scenery. By the time the killer is sending Beachum cracked eggshells in the mail, you might be busy brooding over the film's own considerable fractures (such as the believability of Beachum's romance with his new boss, or the idea that Hopkins' character could ever have been married). But I'd advise you to just kick back and enjoy the cartoon. — Akiva Gottlieb
"You got it backwards, kid," poker legend L.C. Cheever (Robert Duvall) tells his wayward son Huck (Eric Bana). "You play cards the way you should live your life, and you lead your life the way you should play cards." Since I'm not a personal friend of Curtis Hanson or Eric Roth, the two gentlemen who dreamed up Lucky You (Hanson also directed), I can't say whether they write Christmas cards the way they should write screenplays, but. . . well, you get the idea. Ostensibly a hard-hitting look at the emotional constipation of the professional gambler — a breed characterized by recklessness, compulsion, and an almost complete lack of empathy — this long-delayed film (key scenes were shot at the 2005 World Series of Poker) hammers home its banal message in dialogue so soap-opera direct that the poor actors all but wince in pain as they deliver it. (Often there's an uncomfortable pause, too: "Do I really have to say this?")
I know what some of you are thinking: "Who cares whether the dude wins Drew Barrymore's love or earns his daddy's respect? How's his game?" Unfortunately, while Lucky You is jam-packed with cameos from real-life pros — most visible are Sammy Farha, John Hennigan, Barry Greenstein, and Jennifer Harman — none of them seems to have contributed any poker insight. Huck has the best hand in every confrontation we see: When he wins, it's usually by picking off someone's stone bluff; when he loses, it's invariably because his opponent catches a miracle river card. More improbable still, the movie's sappy dramatic climax hinges on Huck's refusal to show his hole cards to the television camera at the World Series main event. (If individual players were allowed to veto the camera at will, there would be no televised poker, period.) Even the table talk here is often ludicrously overstated, with players delivering lengthy dissertations on the play of the entire hand, lest newbies in the audience be confused. Every good poker player knows that the most important skill is game selection. Choose another seat. — Mike D'Angelo
It's a shame that the trailer for Year of the Dog spins the film as a lowbrow comedy that may or may not be about bestiality. ("Guilty," Peter Sarsgaard chuckles when asked if he sleeps with his dogs.) While writer/director Mike White is the mind behind straightforward fare like Nacho Libre and School of Rock, remember that he also penned Chuck & Buck, 2000's hilariously black comedy about obsession and childhood sexual trauma. His directorial debut is an affecting, left-field mix of laughs and pathos that's light years beyond puerile "doggy-style" puns.
Molly Shannon's certainly come a long way from sniffing her armpits on Saturday Night Live. She can, for instance, actually act, playing Peggy, a spinster-in-training whose canine companion dies after an accidental poisoning. When she mourns Pencil's death, only a hard-hearted bastard would want to laugh, and the loss of her furry spooning companion means she's forced out into the unpredictable world of human relationships,
Without cramming too much in, White spends equal time poking fun at uptight married couples, the thirty-something dating scene, and the stifling atmosphere of corporate America. Laura Dern plays Bret, Peggy's germ-phobic sister-in-law (it's the exact role typically reserved for Jane Adams, but Dern is excellent as the overbearing mom striving to protect her kids from life itself). Regina King is wonderfully manic as a Xanax-popping coworker hell-bent on marrying her boyfriend, and "the boss" (Josh Pais) ditches cardboard stereotypes, appearing instead as a soft-spoken sad sack who's perpetually on the edge of tears. Al (John C. Reilly) is Peggy's neighbor, a hunting-crazed everyman whose collection of knives and mounted animal heads fails to pull Peggy's heart strings. Peter Sarsgaard completes the ensemble as a weirdly asexual Nice Guy whose childhood in an abusive cult makes it easier for him to deal with dogs than people.
The film's latter half turns unexpectedly into what might be called The Dissolution of Molly Shannon, or Women on the Verge of an Ideological Breakdown. This is not a light comedy about the silly ways lonely people get overly attached to their pets. By the time Peggy quits eating meat, submerges fur coats in the bath tub, and starts sending donations to a sanctuary for rescued farm animals, White's spun a spot-on, morally ambiguous reflection on the difficult desire to change the world for the better. Amazingly, and quite unexpectedly, this is a mainstream film that's both a satire of and a paean to the animal-rights movement — and that's a whole lot more interesting than dog-fucking. — Scott Indrisek
What happens when Generation X grows up? Douglas Coupland, whose 1991 novel Generation X popularized the term, tackles that question in Everything's Gone Green, his first foray into screenwriting. The PR materials call Green a mix between Garden State and Office Space, a comparison both cringe-inducing and accurate, and while it isn't as angst-ridden as the first, or as hilariously quotable (though it tries) as the last, it is a surprisingly enjoyable breath of cinematic fresh air.
The film begins with ringlet-blessed Ryan (Paulo Costanzo) getting dumped and kicked out of his apartment, then fired for leaving I-hate-my-job poetry on the company's server. Ryan lucks his way into working at a lottery magazine. As this is a Coupland opus, we get plenty of meditations on the aimless middle class. Every character is trying to find a way to cheat the system; Ryan stumbles into a racket where he can launder money for the Asian mob through his lotto job. His corrupting angel Bryce (JR Bourne, who could play a microdermabrasioned Ben Folds in a Lifetime movie) is also the boyfriend of Ryan's love interest, sexy set designer Ming (Steph Song).
Subtle wackiness ensues. His parents build a grow-lab in the basement; a SlutCam enters the picture; director Paul Fox creates what must be the first-ever montage featuring strangely creepy laughing over lunchtime sushi. We wonder: will Ryan will lose his soul in search of the almighty greenback? Actually, we're supposed to, but I never did. Sweet, incorruptible earnestness oozes out of Ryan's eyeballs. We love him, even if he did buy a canary-yellow Mustang and a leather jacket with his dirty money. (It doesn't hurt that Paulo Costanzo is one hot, scrubbed-clean bundle of poodle-haired love.)
As in so many coming-of-modern-age flicks, the plot meanders and is soon lost in the wild Vancouverian ethers. The lack of momentum comes across as a storytelling weakness rather than a commentary on the characters' meandering lives. But the easy likeability of the leads, Coupland's love of wordplay and the gorgeous visuals that make the setting as much of a character as the rest of the cast, result in an rambling pleasure of a film. — Nicole Ankowski
If the release of Lonely Hearts is shrewdly programmed alongside co-star James Gandolfini's return to HBO screens this week, the film also suffers from its proximity to David Fincher's Zodiac, which reinvented and perhaps exhausted the hunt-for-a-serial-killer drama just a few weeks back. The plots are similar: a man (here John Travolta as Detective Elmer Robinson), investigating the titular serial killer(s), slowly loses his family (and perhaps his sanity) while caught in the throes of obsession. But where Fincher's film lived and breathed its protagonist's obsession, following the dirty details down every dead end, Lonely Hearts has little sense of mania. It's an overdesigned, overacted, tone-deaf jumble.
The notorious Lonely Hearts killers of the 1940s — who tracked down war widows through personal ads, then fleeced 'em for cash and left 'em for dead — have already been depicted onscreen (most notably in 1970's pulpy The Honeymoon Killers), and their stand-ins here (Jared Leto and Salma Hayek) are clearly straining for effect. It's hard to tell whether the responsibility for Lonely Hearts' laughable performances lies with the casting director or the actors themselves. Travolta should never be called upon for mournful gravitas, and Gandolfini, who plays Det. Robinson's partner, is nobody's first choice as a voice-over narrator. Leto looks and acts like a cheap (but nevertheless scary) Halloween costume, and Hayek, trying hard, convinces us of her insanity but not her emotions. In the film's confusing back-and-forth chronology, their murders feel too arbitrary to qualify as either premeditated or maniacal.
Writer/director Todd Robinson is the grandson of Travolta's character, which makes his remove from the material all the stranger. Robinson is normally a television director, and his film plays like an overlong CSI episode thrown into a noir blender, with plenty of window dressing. It's Zodiac without a pulse. — Akiva Gottlieb
Frylock, Shake and Meatwad, the protagonists of Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film For Theaters, first appeared in an unproduced Space Ghost Coast-to-Coast episode entitled "Baffler Meal"; baffling they are sure to be, to anyone who wanders unprepared into their full-length film, one of the strangest cinematic projects to ever reach mainstream release. As a casual fan of the show, I'm kind of amazed it exists, and honestly admire the audacity of its creators. But I'm not sure I can recommend it.
Loosely, the TV show on which the film is based follows three anthropomorphic food items, who hypothetically solve mysteries and battle villains in their native New Jersey. In actuality, the Aqua Teens, neither teenaged nor aquatic, rarely do anything heroic, instead focusing on annoying their hapless neighbor Carl and being annoyed by various extraterrestrials (like Ignignokt the Mooninite, whose untimely appearance on a bridge in Boston significantly delayed my mother's commute some months back.) If this summary is hard to understand, consider that the film's press notes don't even try to explain — they're copied straight out of Wikipedia.
The show airs on the Cartoon Network, late at night, in ten-minute segments; this is the best possible time and format for a near-dadaist cartoon. At its best (and here I am referring to the legendary Danzig episode) ATHF hilariously upends decades of genre trash. It can be genuinely, exhilaratingly weird, in short bursts. But ninety minutes is a long time for a parade of non-sequiturs; the format is uncomfortable scaled to that length, and the film (the plot of which I will not even attempt to gloss, for obvious reasons) is less like watching one big episode than like watching nine episodes in a row. By the end, even diehards may find themselves longing for something with a bit more humanity, like, say, Space Ghost. All that said, Movie Film for Theaters will probably be hysterical when it shows up late at night on your television, where it can be properly consumed with quantities of Red Bull, Pop Tarts and hashish that most good theaters tend to disallow. — Peter Smith
Look, I know what you're thinking. There is no way you're watching a movie starring Sandra Bullock as a housewife who is told one day that her husband has died in a gruesome car wreck, only to wake up the next morning and discover him alive, with disturbing signs that what she saw before wasn't just a bad dream. Telling you more about that premise probably won't help: after her initial bad-dream switcheroo, Linda (Bullock) wakes up to yet another bright and shining day, only this time her husband is gone again, and it's the day of his funeral; eventually, she realizes she's living the worst week of life — but it's all out of order! Yes, that premise sounds like some unholy combination of sub-TV elements, like a poltergeist got control of your remote and won't stop furiously switching between the Sci-Fi Channel and Lifetime. And yes, the lovely Ms. Bullock pretty much lost whatever edge she may have had well before clawing her way back to the A-List with stuff like Miss Congeniality. So why are you reading this? More importantly, why did I spend most of Premonition nailed to my seat, genuinely riveted by the goings onscreen? How the hell did this movie turn out to be any good?
Faced with a ridiculous premise, most directors would probably try to compensate by over-stylization, ladling on the baroque camera moves and the hyperkinetic editing in an attempt to distract our attentions from the plot, or to wink at us not to take any of it seriously. But director Mennan Yapo has opted for a more sober approach. His remarkable control of atmosphere and tension suddenly takes this silly little story and brings its grim undertow of tragedy to the surface. Premonition starts off goofy film, but its conviction turns it into something genuinely moving.
Indeed, that's not the only way that Premonition transforms itself. It turns out this is less a pulse-pounding thriller and more of a domestic melodrama. By the end, we're not so much wondering what exactly is happening to Linda (a good thing, since the explanation, such as it is, doesn't make a lick of sense) but whether she will be able to keep her family in one piece — literally. It probably won't be for all tastes — those who can't stand Bullock in any context probably won't appreciate her low-key performance here, and those looking for major horror jolts will be severely disappointed. And the less said about the film's half-hearted religious subplot, the better. But for much of its running time, Premonition manages to be a curiously unsettling, gripping hybrid. So sue me — I liked it. — Bilge Ebiri
Zack Snyder's otherworldly adaptation of Frank Miller's graphic novel opens with a disturbing scene, as residents of ancient Sparta toss any newborn they deem physically inferior off a cliff. So it comes as a bit of a surprise when the film later posits the stand of three hundred Spartans against the invading Persian army as a fight for freedom against tyranny — saving European civilization from a swarthy Asiatic horde of multiculturalism, lesbians and ten-foot-tall ogres. If you're already confused, you're not alone. It's not enough that 300 doesn't quite know what kind of political stance it wants to take; it's not even sure what kind of movie it wants to be. Trying to find political resonance in a story like this is a fool's errand, to be sure, but for a filmmaker to try to tack on political resonance is not only foolish, but irresponsible.
That said, 300 is at times such a fascinating film that you can't help but embrace some of it — at least as a symptom of contemporary filmmaking. Much ink has already been spilled about how CGI dominates 300, so much so that the film could almost count as animated. And sure, it looks great — Snyder's slow-motion sequences of individual Spartan warriors slicing and dicing their way through reams of nondescript Persian soldiers have a study-in-motion, Eadweard Muybridge charm to them. (Oh, the irony: all that CGI, gone to replicate what a guy with an antiquated camera did over a hundred years ago.)
But it won't raise your pulse level one bit. Despite the numerical odds, until their final stand our Spartan heroes don't really have to put up with much grief. At one point, a gigantic Persian troll-monster thing shows up, straight out of the Caves of Moria sequence in The Fellowship of the Rings; five minutes later, he's been dispatched without a single casualty. For a film that's allegedly so groundbreaking, 300 feels curiously familiar. Here is the vaguely Eastern-inflected score straight out of Gladiator and a dozen other films (European civilization might have triumphed, but they sure do have a soft spot for Middle Eastern music in these sword-and-sandal flicks, don't they?). And here are the battle scenes that seem lifted wholesale from countless other films (not to mention a final shot that's straight from Braveheart). About the only thing that 300 brings to the table is nudity: yes, those original Spartans fought pretty much naked, and Snyder, like the secret love child of John Milius and Derek Jarman, appears to have given their rippling thigh muscles and slick six-packs more loving attention and detail than pretty much anything else in the film. — Bilge Ebiri
Can a movie work as a compelling character study and still be largely devoid of characters? David Fincher's sprawling, impossibly dense, unusually gripping take on the Zodiac killings that haunted the San Francisco Bay Area in the late '60s and early '70s dares to be that movie. Shorn of the usual introspection and backstory that accompanies serial killer films (and, let's face it, most films in general) Fincher's film takes an almost Olympian view of the Zodiac events — sifting through the murders themselves, the police reaction and the media coverage with effortless abandon.
That's not to suggest that the film generalizes its subject matter; on the contrary, this is one of the most exhaustively detailed, obsessive films made about. . . well, anything . Like many others, Fincher himself was apparently fixated on the Zodiac killings as a kid in the '70s, and he's made a film that would do that kid and his fellow Zodiac fiends proud. More lay viewers, however, may have some problems with the unconventional approach, given that Fincher and screenwriter James Vanderbilt give relatively little priority to the ostensible real-life protagonists: legendary San Francisco detective Dave Toschi (Mark Ruffalo), crime reporter Paul Avery (Robert Downey, almost stealing the film) and cartoonist-turned-sleuth Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal, the closest thing the movie has to a lead). If anything, the main character in Zodiac is not really a person at all, but rather the hive-mind of terror, activity and obsession that resulted from the case. There's a reason why the atmosphere positively drips off the screen here: it's our hero.
Despite the surplus of mood, those salivating for the usual Fincherian camera pyrotechnics may well be disappointed — save for some nifty color schemes, our man is more in Alan J. Pakula territory here. Zodiac recalls films like The Parallax View and All the President's Men more than it does Se7en or Silence of the Lambs. But the director's got something more important than style on his mind. His newfound austerity is there to serve the film's single-minded fixation on the Zodiac phenomenon. Fancy camerawork — or, for that matter, characters — would just get in the way. — Bilge Ebiri
Perhaps the most tragic thing about Joel Schumacher's almost laughably awful thriller is that, every once in a while, you can almost see the film it might have been. To some, casting Jim Carrey as the average family man who develops an unhealthy obsession with the titular digits will seem like this bizarre film's greatest misstep. On the contrary, casting Carrey is the one thing they've gotten right. It's just that Schumacher appears to have no idea what to do with him.
It's not that Carrey gives a particularly good performance here (he doesn't), but rather that one can imagine how he might have, under the right circumstances. As Walter Sparrow, a shlubby, floppy-haired middle-class guy working in animal control, he starts off as his usual likable self, then quickly degenerates into an obsessive who'd make Richard Dreyfus's character in Close Encounters blush. You see, the book our hero starts reading at first appears to be a rather intricately plotted and slightly deviant handmade thriller, but is later revealed to be a confession to a murder that happened over a decade ago. Even stranger, some of the elements in the book appear to mirror aspects of Walter's own life. As Sparrow and his family (particularly his wife, played by a very able Virginia Madsen) get drawn into this sordid tale, dark secrets are revealed, even darker rooms are found, and we hurtle towards a bizarrely far-fetched conclusion that you'll still see coming a mile away. That is, if you haven't plummeted into one of the film's cavernous plot holes along the way.
It's hard for Carrey to shake free of his image as a goofball; his obsession doesn't really register as dangerous. But that's where the film just might have worked. One senses that The Number 23 began life as an offbeat, occasionally humorous thriller with outsize elements — something along the lines of A History of Violence, or even Memento. Carrey might have made it work. But Schumacher isn't able to deal with tonal delicacy the way directors like David Cronenberg can. He directs with a heavy hammer, flattening any hint of nuance with bombast and mismatched portent. The result is a disaster on practically all levels, but given the film it might have been, you won't know whether to laugh or cry. — Bilge Ebiri
There's a slang term in contemporary Germany, "ostalgie," that describes a nostalgia for the good old days of the GDR. It's just this misguided wistfulness that prompted Florian Henckel von Donnersmark to make The Lives of Others, a haunting drama set in East Germany in 1984, which chillingly captures the way the Stasi — the secret police service — oppressed its supposed beneficiaries. The milieu is impeccable; a sense of total surveillance and constant danger pervades and makes the film as thrilling as it is grim.
The excellent Ulrich Mühe plays Gerd Wiesler, a rank-and-file Stasi man sent to spy on the seemingly party-loyal playwright Georg Dreymann. With Wiesler's commanding officer Hempf (a disturbing Thomas Thieme) forcing the playwright's girlfriend into a covert affair, the situation gets complicated — and more complicated still as Wiesler develops feelings of empathy for his unknowing targets.
All of this is keenly observed and extremely well-acted, but you might be troubled by the ending, which is perhaps too eager to redeem its protagonist. Though the final scenes are moving, there must have been a more ambiguous way to end such a carefully balanced and thoughtful rumination on decency and cruelty. I can say no more without compromising the plot, so I'll stop here; see this fascinating film with friends, and you will surely have out the debate for yourself. — Peter Smith
The bizarre little doc Fired! effectively comprises two movies; both are reasonably entertaining, though they don't work so well together. The film centers on star-producer Annabelle Gurwitch, a down-and-out actress who, when fired from a Woody Allen play (he tells her she "looks retarded"), goes into a tailspin and begins to speculate about all the other showbiz folk who've been fired from all sorts of jobs. For its first half, the film basically consists of intercut interviews with various ubiquitous actors and comedians (Jeff Garlin, Illeana Douglas, Tim Allen, Sarah Silverman, etc.) recounting to Gurwitch their horror stories of shitcan woe. So far, so good.
However, at about the midway point, Gurwitch's film gains a belated — and somewhat oddly placed — social conscience and gets all Michael Moore on us, tackling the broader national problem of outsourcing and downsizing. Much of it's centered, in classic Moore fashion, on General Motors and its hypocritical tendency to cut thousands of jobs while giving its CEOs pay raises. The results are, for a while, reasonably interesting and occasionally quite funny — one particular interlude involving a sock puppet recounting of Tate Donovan getting fired from the film version of Torch Song Trilogy is particularly hilarious.
Still, one can't help but feel that this dual conceit, leaping from well-known actors losing work to blue-collar autoworkers getting axed by the thousands, is one driven more by convenience (or, to put it less diplomatically, "padding") than a desire for social justice. The connection doesn't work: There's something fundamentally unseemly about Fred Willard, Harry Shearer and Gurwitch lounging around in a pool talking about their past work woes, when juxtaposed with thousands of working-class families in the Midwest losing their livelihoods. — Bilge Ebiri
Maria Maggenti's low-budget DV feature — produced by the same folks who brought us Tadpole and Pieces of April — could be billed as many things: a revival of old-fashioned screwball comedy, a queer romance, an example of DIY indie filmmaking. But all those descriptors fade when faced with what the film really is: an engagingly harmless sitcom episode. That may sound like a diss, but it isn't meant to be.
Surely, ten or fifteen years ago, the idea of a comedy about a lesbian who winds up inadvertently two-timing her latest girlfriend (with said girlfriend's long-term boyfriend) would have been consigned to the far corners of underground cinema. But nowadays, it just feels pleasantly humdrum. Sensitive writer Allegra (Elizabeth Reaser) gets dumped by her girlfriend due to her lack of passion, then goes to a party, meets Columbia prof Philip (Justin Kirk) and strikes up a brief and meaningless affair with him. Turns out Philip is on his way out of a lengthy relationship with the lovely Grace (Gretchen Mol). By accident, Grace and Allegra meet up, and Allegra is smitten. Pleasantly inoffensive wackiness ensues.
There's opera, nice apartments, upscale parties and a playful score, and even the more conservative members of the Woody Allen club will probably dig it to some extent. It would have helped, certainly, if Maggenti's script had more laugh-out-loud moments, or the occasional whiff of scandal to it; even the sex scenes feel tasteful and tame. As it is, the film is disposably likable, in a good way. Indeed, one could say that Maggenti's transformation of such potentially edgy subject matter into something so middlebrow is in itself an act of daring reinvention. — Bilge Ebiri
Watching the absurd plot of Catch and Release unfold, you keep waiting for the hysterics to kick in. Jennifer Garner's fiancé died the day before her wedding, his supposed best friend is boning the caterer at the funeral, she's being asked to return her engagement ring to her mother-in-law, and oh yeah, almost-hubby was a secret millionaire, but he steadily cheated on her and has a three-year-old son with a Hollywood massage therapist. Let's get nuts! But Erin Brockovich screenwriter Susannah Grant's directorial debut is less interested in tawdry drama — the emotional-rollercoaster plot notwithstanding — than stages of deflected grief. Gray (Garner) forgoes hysterics and genuinely tries to make things work. This is not to say that Catch and Release is anything more than an awkwardly scripted romantic dramedy, but it has its idiosyncratic charms.
The highs and lows of Catch and Release are perhaps best represented by geek-messiah Kevin Smith, who chose the film for his mostly inauspicious debut as a serious actor. He spends his early scenes as a poor man's Jack Black, incessantly stuffing his face and dodging responsibility. Then, halfway through, he halfheartedly attempts suicide, and upon recovery morphs into both a surrogate father and an oracle. (The cutesy script gives him a job as the purveyor of tea-box quotations for Celestial Seasonings.) Unfunny and ridiculous, I know, but somehow Smith is more believable as the sage than as the slacker. Catch and Release eventually submits to genre conventions, with Timothy Olyphant as the caterer-fucker and Gray's improbable love interest, but it's not difficult to pinpoint the outline of a better movie trapped inside a mediocre January rom-com. — Akiva Gottlieb
A peculiar sociological vanity project from a director unrenowned for his political acuity, Anthony Minghella's Breaking and Entering is the type of film one makes out of guilt for one's own success. The story of a pretty-boy London architect and gentrification expert — played by the ineffably smarmy Jude Law — coming to terms with his own cultural privilege, the film is actually less grating for its pontification on racial boundaries and urban discord than for the outright ineptitude of its storytelling. It's like Cache without a clue.
Minghella, the competent craftsman behind The English Patient and Cold Mountain, has set his sights on a cross-sectioned, Crash-style foray into London's ever-shifting cultural landscape, but his script is riddled with blunt metaphors and a series of preposterous developments. In this social parable, Law's design firm is robbed by a Bosnian-immigrant teenager, and Law chases the boy back to his apartment. In what the film posits as a parallel act of theft, the architect begins an affair with the thief's mother (Juliette Binoche, straining to give credibility to an accent she can't handle), who later, in order to prevent her son's incarceration, decides to blackmail her lover. (It's a plot twist that faintly echoes the far superior, far less serious Notes on a Scandal.)
Like Crash scribe Paul Haggis, Minghella was robbed in real life, and therefore inspired to make a film about haves and have-nots, race and privilege. Far be it from me to deny Hollywood filmmakers the right to a social conscience, but need they tie all our social problems into a neat little box of everything-is-connected abstraction? Breaking and Entering never reckons with the issues it raises, instead escaping into a banal discourse on sin and blackmail where, per the tagline, "love is no ordinary crime." — Akiva Gottlieb
An epic depiction of France's near-revolution of May 1968 and its aftermath, Regular Lovers sets up a dialogue with several other films about the events. Its period ambiance is perfect, but instead of feeling like a documentary, it suggests an apocryphal French New Wave opus, while jousting overtly with Bernardo Bertolucci's The Dreamers. Francois (Louis Garrel) is an aspiring poet who dodges military police to fight on the barricades of May '68. He becomes involved with Lilie (Clotilde Hesme), a sculptor who works in a foundry casting objects for more successful artists, and hangs out with Antoine (Julien Lucas), a wealthy opium addict.
The pacing of Regular Lovers is leisurely, but Garrel assumes that we need some time to adjust to the rhythms of another period. His characters aren't motivated by ideology as much as the chance to make a difference in everyday life: they view travel or poetry as political acts. While this doesn't always turn out so well, Regular Lovers never suggests that the attempt was misguided or doomed from the start. A thousand sub-MTV montages set to bad pop songs have destroyed the idea of music as an expression of ecstatic spirit; in a dance sequence set to the Kinks' "This Time Tomorrow," Garrel manages to dredge that notion back from nostalgia's dustbin. He brings the past — even its unfashionable bits — back to life with an immediacy that bypasses retro cool. For that reason alone, Regular Lovers is a must-see. — Steve Erickson
Andrei Kravchuk's The Italian, which tracks a Russian boy's escape from his orphanage in an attempt to find his mother, is shot through with a despair immediately reminscent of 19th century literature — the word "Dickensian" comes to mind. As a result, it's also the kind of film that will prompt more jaded viewers (or, ahem, critics) to put up their guards: here comes another wallow through the underbelly of humanity, seen through the eyes of an adorable tyke. If you don't cry, you'll curse the screen. Actually, you'll probably just do both.
But it turns out The Italian is a much weirder film than its potentially cloying subject matter would lead us to expect. For starters, the jury is out on whether Vanya, our diminutive, tow-headed hero (Kolya Spiridonov, in an excelllent performance) is ever really making the right decisions. What prompts his escape is the promise that a loving Italian couple is about to adopt him, coupled with the fear that his biological mother might be out there, somewhere, and that she may come for him one day. As a result, we never quite know what to make of Vanya's escape and of his unlikely journey to find his vanished parent. Is this a fool's errand, or the heroic journey of a plucky, Oliver Twist-like protagonist? That it never really answers this question is one of The Italian's great conceptual strengths. And the film's bizarrely atonal, spare, drifting electronic soundtrack helps create an off-kilter world of perpetual unease. Kravchuk avoids easy identification, giving us a world of characters whose intentions are often complicated and not at all clear-cut.
All these elements are to be admired on some level — there is clearly an attempt to do things differently here on the part of the filmmaker – but the end result is curiously lacking in warmth or even narrative tension, like a stylistic experiment in reinventing a twice-told tale. Perhaps that's also why the film seems to desperately shed its neorealist trappings and, in its final act, takes on the golden-hued and slightly unreal aura of a fairy tale. It seems strange to say this concerning a movie about a Russian moppet searching for his mom, but The Italian is ultimately cold and curiously uninvolving — a promising stylistic gambit, perhaps, but ultimately not very affecting, or effective. — Bilge Ebiri
In 1999, pint-size San Fernando Valley drug dealer Jesse James Hollywood kidnapped and murdered fifteen year-old straight-A student Nicholas Markowitz, after Markowitz's half-brother defaulted on a loan. Anyone who read the ensuing LA Times cover story could guess that it was headed for the big screen, for better or worse. Director Nick Cassavetes (related to his brilliant dad in body, not in spirit) scored the rights and was granted access to the case file by prosecutors, in hopes that the film would help bring Jesse James Hollywood out of hiding. He was caught last year in South America, and attempted to block the film's release.
The names have been tastefully changed and an A-list cast assembled, but let nobody pretend that Alpha Dog is a cautionary tale or a statement on societal ills — this is an exploitation flick through and through. If you know the outcome beforehand, it plays like torture porn, a good kid making one bad decision after another on the road to a dark, dark place. Cassavetes has called the project a case study in bad parenting, but Alpha Dog never lingers on this idea, instead reveling in the violence and misogyny of his wealthy, insanely attractive, Scarface-and-video-game-fueled youngsters. Jesse James Hollywood's only crime, it seems, was to take a stupid idea a bit too far.
Possibly the most egregious thing about Alpha Dog is how effectively gut-churning a drama it often is, coupled with the fact that Emile Hirsch (as Hollywood-proxy Johnny Truelove), Anton Yelchin, and Justin Timberlake inhabit their lead roles with palpable vulnerability. Combining high production values with the most depraved elements of E! True Hollywood Story and Larry Clark films, Alpha Dog is bound for prurient misappropriation and cult-classic status. — Akiva Gottlieb
Timing is, indeed, everything. When the outlandish Thai film Tears of the Black Tiger premiered at Cannes in 2001, its zonked-out kaleidoscope of genre homage must have felt like some kind of visionary triumph. Maybe that's why Miramax snatched it up with great fanfare at the time, but it doesn't quite explain why, like so many other Asian films, it wound up gathering dust on the studio's shelf for years, until the plucky Magnolia Films decided to buy it recently and give it a proper theatrical release. Wisit Sasanatieng's film is still a wondrously inventive and entertaining romp, but it's hard not to feel that the last few years of endless experimentation coming from Asia has dulled a bit of its edge.
The story (which actually has strange overtones of The Princess Bride) focuses on the doomed love between a rich girl and a peasant boy, whose relationship is kindled anew after years spent apart, during which time he has become the titular bandit. She, however, has been promised to a slimy police captain. Much candy-colored carnage ensues, in a film that, while officially billed as an homage to '50s Thai Westerns, also references everyone from Sergio Leone to Douglas Sirk to Sam Raimi along the way.
Watching Black Tiger, I imagine this is what rolling down a hill trapped inside a giant paint can must feel like. That might in fact be the best way to enjoy this garish, hallucinatory oddity. Screw the story, and screw even the hip referentiality: on an aesthetic level, with its swirling pastel colors, its mad soundtrack, its dizzying close-ups, Tears of the Black Tiger is pure cinema, for better and for worse. — Bilge Ebiri
Genres exist to be destroyed, or at least reinvigorated, and last year's Half Nelson did both for the "inspiring and unconventional inner-city teacher" drama. Along with exceptional performances and a semi-documentary realism, the film worked because it incorporated the teacher's curriculum into the filmmaking, just as the teacher worked his personal shortcomings into his teaching. Freedom Writers is another beast entirely: a pedestrian, cut-and-paste MTV Films release dumped onto screens in the first week of January. But Richard LaGravenese's film somehow transcends its considerable limitations through the force of its ideas.
Hilary Swank assumes the Michelle Pfeiffer mantle as a well-meaning college grad who, in the wake of the L.A. riots, opts to teach a class of at-risk students at Long Beach's Roosevelt High School as an exercise in social action. Armed with a Starbucks latte and a chichi pearl necklace, she fruitlessly attempts to charm a freshman class separated by gang colors and racial disparity. But after a visit to the Museum of Tolerance and a reading of Anne Frank's diary, the students begin to put their own histories on paper and warm up to the idea of an education.
Freedom Writers is overlong and schematic, and the students' transition from gangbangers to peacemakers lacks fluidity, but the film offers an inspiring view of history as teaching tool. It's like a calculated riposte to the teacher in The History Boys who's so overwhelmed by the Holocaust that he would rather keep it out of the lesson plan. Freedom Writers doesn't deny that equating World War II with inner-city gang violence is a risible gesture, but it convinces that an inability to learn from history is the most damaging form of Holocaust denial. -- Akiva Gottlieb
Children's author and artist Beatrix Potter led a fascinating life, but you'd never really know it from Chris Noonan's biopic, which turns one of English literature's more intriguing figures into a twee romantic heroine with standard-issue family problems. The film begins with the thirtysomething, unmarried Beatrix (Renee Zellweger) attempting to find someone to publish her charming children's stories, then trudges dutifully through her secret engagement to her eventual publisher Norman Warne (Ewan McGregor), a romance frowned upon by her stiff-upper-lip parents, who deplore the idea of her marrying a tradesman. There's a lot of familiar Victorian-era misogyny afoot here, and the film's presentation of Potter as an early icon of women's lib is actually fairly accurate.
But it's hard not to feel like there's something missing. The cast is likable enough, and the Lake District locations of the film's final act look marvelous. Noonan, the talented director behind the original Babe, adds some animated grace notes to scenes of Beatrix talking to her animal creations; if anyone is going to turn the cuteness quotient up to 11, it might as well be him. In classic Hollywood fashion, there's a general sense that our heroine has retained her child's-eye view of the world. Certainly, Zellweger plays her so, speaking haltingly and narrowing her eyes and scrunching her face together whenever attempting a smile. But the central paradox of Potter's life -- her struggle to be recognized for her remarkable adult accomplishments yet preserve that aforementioned childlike wonder -- feels underdeveloped, like a passing notion subsumed by the need to make a kid-friendly film for the holiday marketplace. There's more to Miss Potter than what's in Miss Potter. The film's excisions might not qualify as a crime, but they sure feel like a waste. -- Bilge Ebiri
Thirty years after the celebrated first entry and half that time after the fifth -- one of the single worst sequels in history -- a sixth Rocky has come to theaters to redeem Sylvester Stallone, his character, and unbelievably, his franchise. Rocky Balboa, like Rocky himself, is clumsy. Its story lurches from scene to scene, the compulsory training montage is downright distracting, and Stallone makes some absurd choices. It's a tie as to which is worse, bringing in Talia Shire's ghost in the first ten minutes, or dressing Rocky's dog "Punchy" in a grey sweat-suit so he can tag along for Rocky's last jog up the museum steps. Ignore these stumbles. Rocky Balboa is a very good movie, and a testament to how a great character can endure twenty years as a pop-culture punchline and still retain its potency and power.
Balboa's strength comes from quiet and reflection. In the opening scenes, we find Rocky waking in his small South Philly house looking not a little haggard and, yes, old. He goes about his morning routine wearing the same porkpie hat and leather jacket he did thirty years ago. In moments like these, Stallone taps into the same melancholy, awkward tone that made Rocky and Rocky II so memorable and enduring. Rocky Balboa evokes those films in well-written dialogue between Rocky and the characters surrounding him, particularly his estranged son Rocky Jr. (Milo Ventimiglia of Heroes channeling Stallone to an eerie extent) and Geraldine Hughes' Marie, Rocky's would-be adopted daughter. Aside from the unfortunate bits mentioned above, no time is wasted; returning characters like Rocky's old trainer Duke appear without fanfare or undue focus. For a franchise most remembered for its outlandish excess (Rocky did, after all, defeat communism in Rocky IV), Balboa is impressively restrained. Sylvester Stallone made himself a star with his story of a nobody finding glory. It's fairly incredible that three decades later he has recaptured that success by finishing that same story. — John Constantine
Generations of country-western and blues singers have laid out the protocol for what a man ought to do about his cheatin' wife, with recommended remedies involving a tall bottle of Jack Daniels at one extreme and a loaded shotgun at the other. But The Painted Veil, adapted from the novel by W. Somerset Maugham, takes place in the mid-1920s, and thus its uptight prig of a hero, bacteriologist Walter Fane (Edward Norton), lacks their wise counsel. Having rescued vain, shallow socialite Kitty (Naomi Watts) from her stifling home with his offer of a loveless marriage, he'd expected gratitude and respect, if not passion. So when it becomes clear that his bride, with whom he's recently traveled to Shanghai, has cuckolded him with the local vice consul (Liev Schreiber), Walter seizes upon a rather unique solution. He will volunteer to bring his Western medical know-how to a tiny, distant Chinese village suffering from a cholera epidemic. He will almost surely die trying to help. And Kitty, of course, will accompany him.
Even by today's standards, this is a singularly perverse romantic scenario -- indeed, it's probably more perverse to a contemporary audience, since a modern-day Kitty would just flip Walter the bird and go find a lanky pop singer. Director John Curran (We Don't Live Here Anymore, which also pivoted on a faithless Watts) and screenwriter Ron Nyswaner (Philadelphia) lend a slightly jagged edge to Maugham's air of vicious civility, mostly by eliding key scenes -- we neither see the affair begin nor witness Walter's discovery of it, and spend much of the potentially expository first act playing catch-up. By the time the story veers in a more conventional and sentimental direction, with Kitty discovering her inner Florence Nightingale as well as Walter's more admirable qualities, you may be too engrossed to object. If only Norton, who also produced, had rejected himself in favor of a more naturally diffident actor -- preferably an actual Brit. Even when Walter is ostensibly at his most feeble and remote, you can still detect the fierce undercurrent of self-determination peculiar to American movie stars. He may surprise Kitty, but he never surprises us. — Mike D'Angelo
Given the advance press, both intentional and unintentional, one is tempted to try and stare really hard at Mel Gibson's millennial Mayan epic, trying to tease out some grand idea — either the film's stated theme about the death of civilization, or the kind of stuff its creator would rather you not think about, whether he's some kind of loony bigot or not. But Apocalypto, which devotes practically one half of its running time to an elaborate chase, probably owes more to the stuff Young Mel likely watched as a kid — Cornel Wilde's 1966 classic The Naked Prey comes to mind — and to the movies Fresh-faced Actor Mel starred in at the beginning of his career. Think what the Mad Max movies would be like with loincloths and no cars, and you get the idea. That said, you might also, at a few points, be reminded of Scott of the Antarctic, the infamous Monty Python sketch where an excited blockbuster producer keeps exclaiming, "And the blood just goes Phhoosshh!"
Apocalypto also feels at home next to Braveheart and Passion of the Christ. Not because of the litany of physical cruelties inflicted on its characters, but because, just as Passion was an extension of the worst parts of Braveheart — its painfully earnest, over-directed bookends — Apocalypto is an extension of the best — that fuck–you middle two hours where Gibson let loose some of the most brutally kinetic filmmaking this side of Eisenstein. For much of its running time, Apocalypto is a nastily effective and exciting action movie. Bloated? Certainly. A bit too in love with its own gratuitous bloodletting? Probably. A product of a twisted mind? Perhaps. Profound? Hell, no. — Bilge Ebiri
The press-kit for Edward Zwick's conscientious adventure Blood Diamond quotes the director as saying that a serious film with a higher moral purpose can also be an entertaining action film. And we're with him on that. In theory. But in practice, such hybrids tend to fail, because Hollywood's understanding of "serious" is so painfully shallow and childish that most right-thinking adults roll their eyes. Case in point: Zwick's own Grand Guignol chase flick with a heart, which works pretty well when it's mainly about running away from a bunch of bloodthirsty guerrillas, but drowns in its own self-importance whenever it reaches toward something more ennobling.
I guess I should have said this first, though: the diamond trade in Africa, especially until recently, was a disgusting business mired in murderous corruption, and any film that draws attention to that fact is worthwhile to some extent. Blood Diamond begins in Sierra Leone, with Mende fisherman Solomon Vandy (Djimon Hounsou, bringing his usual, welcome intensity) taken from his village in a bloody raid and enslaved by guerrillas. Laboring in the diamond fields, Solomon finds a giant pink diamond and hides it. Later, in prison, he attracts the attention of South African soldier of fortune Danny Archer (Leonardo DiCaprio, trying very, very hard), who, realizing this tortured, kind-hearted fisherman might be his chance for a big score, tries to convince Solomon to lead him back to the diamond fields. Along the way, we're treated to scenes of Solomon's young son, who has forced into the guerilla army and brainwashed, being trained to kill everything that moves. Add to the mix a spunky, crusading American journalist (Jennifer Connelly, wasted), and you've got yourself a journey towards redemption, Hollywood-style.
And that's the problem. If it were a straight action movie, Blood Diamond's one-dimensional preachiness wouldn't be so distracting. But as the film progresses, even as it offers us a few breathtaking chase scenes, it becomes clear that this film wants to move us, to impassion us, to make us care. Unfortunately, its methods — from Connelly's one-note journalist to, no joke, the standing ovation at the end — come from a playbook so laughably insincere that the film winds up making us groan instead. — Bilge Ebiri
"A Woman in Trouble." That's the only descriptive text we get on the promotional poster for David Lynch's latest, the sublimely unhinged — from narrative, from celluloid, from everything — Inland Empire. And I wouldn't want it any other way. Lynch has taken another synapse-tickling turn for the engagingly inexplicable, using three hours of muddy digital video to further indulge his fascination with the pristine underworld labyrinths of Lost Highway and Mulholland Dr. Intimate and globe-spanning, ugly and poetic, banal and profound, Inland Empire reaffirms that there's no other filmmaker we'd willingly follow so far down the rabbit hole.
Our woman in trouble is Nikki Grace/Susan Blue (Laura Dern), an actress who accepts a starring role in a Sirkian infidelity melodrama called "On High in Blue Tomorrows," alongside a womanizing, leather-jacketed neo-Brando type named Devon Berk (Justin Theroux). That they will fall in love seems a fait accompli — especially since, as in Mulholland Dr., the line between actor and character is rendered nonexistent. The conceit initially seems banal (and Lynch isn't above the dumb gotcha of pulling back from a particularly emotional scene to show us a rolling camera), but Lynch has complicated the idea by shooting on DV. As a result, the film-within-the-film sometimes looks like real life, and "real life" often looks like a film. In the words of our heroine, "it's kinda laid a mindfuck on me."
Dern's character, whatever her identity, is clearly on a quest, one she understands about as much as the audience does. So we follow. We follow to early-twentieth-century Poland, to the makeshift skid row of Hollywood and Vine, to a room of buxom beauties doing the "Loco-Motion." We follow the spray-painted letters A-X-X-O-N-N. We watch a Beckettian bunny sitcom. A watch becomes a totem. Repeated phrases gain significance. Recognizable performers make periodic intrusions. Lynch has decided to release this unmarketable project on his own dime, in order to launch an awards-campaign for Laura Dern. Good move. This is clearly the performance of the year. At times, the entire narrative seems like a shrine constructed to Dern's courage, to her propulsive willingness to open Lynch's doors. It's the type of performance that haunts your dreams. And as Inland Empire makes perfectly clear, this performance will likely haunt the actress as well. — Akiva Gottlieb